{le logjji batkyta'o morna} logical keyboard layouts

[George Foot <george.foot@MERTON.OXFORD.AC.UK>]

coi rodo

Firstly, is {batkyta'o} = button-board a sensible word for
keyboard? It was the best I could find, but {tanbo} implies a
plank sort of board. Perhaps {skamrkiborda}? Or is that just the
lazy way out? ;)


There was some interest recently in how appropriate the Dvorak
layout is for Lojban typing. I was playing around last night and
wrote a short program to assess how different keyboard layouts
compare with one another for a given piece of text.

Preliminary results seem to suggest that the Dvorak layout
should still be the more comfortable, despite things which seem
wrong, like having the ' key on the same hand as the vowels, and
the H key having a central position.

I haven't tried it on many Lojban texts yet (I only have two!),
and naturally the results depend to a large extent on how the
program is configured (e.g. how `bad' it thinks different finger
movements are). The results for the Martin Luther King speech
and Tikitiki-whatever were (lower numbers indicating more
comfort):

            Qwerty      Dvorak      Lojban

luther      123.45      80.42       65.92
tikitiki    126.96      78.18       68.75


The Lojban keyboard layout is a fictional one of my own invention;
it is the same as the Dvorak layout but with the apostrophe key
interchanged with the H key. Just this small change does seem to
have made a big difference. This is probably the only change
that could be made without disrupting people's typing too much;
since the apostrophe sounds almost like an H anyway it's not
that great a change IMHO. Of course, no OS supports it ;).

It's encouraging that the figures in each case were so close;
implying that these two texts use similar letter patterns
perhaps. Incidentally, for a text in English (with some bits in
C code) that I wrote:

            Qwerty      Dvorak
            123.31      46.27

This text was quite a bit longer, though.

Assuming my program's doing a reasonable job, then, the Qwerty
layout is just as bad for both languages, the Dvorak layout is
better for both, but not as much better for Lojban as it is for
English (which I expected, anyway). My {jbobatkymorna} is of
course best for Lojban writing :).

If anybody is interested in the program, you can download the C source
code (very small, zipped) or a DOS binary (26k, also compressed) from this
web page:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0407/lojban/

I'll try to put some statistics for other documents on that page
too, if I have time.

The C source ought to compile on almost any C-capable system
(Unix, Windows, DOS, etc), but the makefile will need
modification for anything other than a DOS system using djgpp.

It is a command line utility, which can read an input file, or
stdin, outputting to an output file, or stdout, and can switch
between keyboard types on the command line. Adding new keyboard
layouts, or modifying existing ones for testing, is fairly
trivial but requires a rebuild for each. Ditto for changing the
scoring system.

I'd be interested to hear any comments on these results, the
scoring system, or feasibility of using a keyboard layout
designed especially for Lojban writing.


co'o mi'e djorj

--
George Foot <mert0407@sable.ox.ac.uk>
Merton College, Oxford